Technical information

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The Witcher is powered by a new version of the BioWare Aurora Engine, modified for a single-player experience. A number of changes have been introduced to the original BioWare Aurora Engine, and some of them are described below.

In BioWare's Aurora Engine, the world is designed exactly as it was envisioned rather than utilizing a tile-based system. Because of this, the visuals are claimed to be unique and rich in detail. All the environments are created in 3D Studio Max and then exported into the game engine.

Light maps

The CD Projekt's version of the engine supports lightmaps, generated in 3D Studio Max. Shadows generated this way are claimed to look more realistic and are faster performance-wise.

Texture paint

This is a special tool that enables to paint the environment using custom textures, with the purpose of saving time and promising a more natural look than ordinary mapping.

All the in game and tool set rendering is done using DirectX9, and the engine now supports many different shaders (water effect, bump mapping, environment mapping, etc). Additionally the whole rendering system has been unified and a new light manager was added.

Other important changes include the following: motion-captured animation, physics effects, new mechanics and combat system. There are also many other modifications, such as introduction of portals, additional graphical effects (glows, advanced dynamic shadows, blurs)

The latest version of the game is 1.4, also known as the Enhanced Edition. The 1.4 patch contains all the fixes that were included in the earlier patches, so if you have just installed the game, you only need the 1.4 patch.

The most frequent criticism about the game's performance is about the load times. Try these tips to help lower them.

Defragment your hard drive(s), preferably using a third-party tool instead of the Defrag utility that ships with Windows.

In addition, the game autosaves each time something changes in the Journal (added, updated or completed quest). Given the time it takes to save, many have asked that a future patch include a setting to disable autosave.

The time required to display the save or load screens apparently increases dramatically as the number of saves increases. Hence, it is recommended that the number of savegames be kept under control to avoid this. The saves are stored in My Documents\The Witcher\saves.

Many tweaks were made to reduce load times and change how autosave is handled in the 1.2 patch. Most notably, when going from a large zone (Vizima Temple Quarter for example) to inside a building (a house for example) and back, the load time will be much shorter than when initially loading the large zone. The game simply keeps the large zone cached in memory because it is almost certain that the player will return to it. This has helped considerably in reducing load times when exploring Vizima, for instance.

The Witcher may exhaust virtual address space when running on 32-bit Windows Vista. Microsoft has released a hotfix that addresses this problem. Please download the hotfix from the following location when playing the game on 32-bit Windows Vista: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105

If you have patched your installation of Vista to SP1, then you already have this hotfix. KB940105 is already included in Windows Vista Service Pack 1